Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
No bio...
User ID: 1226
Those ideals being... what, exactly?
Liberty, Truth, Justice, the American Way, Human Rights, Democracy, Transgender For Everyone...
Does it have any resemblance of a common culture
This what Scott Alexander coined the phrase "Blue Tribe" to refer to. American culture is not the Red Tribe. Plus, to be honest, I think there's just a general failure to model their adversaries' preferences on the part of right-wingers, where the weirdest, most idiosyncratic are assumed to stand in for the whole. Libs also like football, cars, car commercials featuring George Washington running over the British, and so on.
you're hard pressed to find a group of similar scale that doesn't have such contempt and outright hate.
Most of them? The takeover of the American conservative movement by people who hate America and Americans is fairly recent. While they're playing on pre-existing sentiments, the severity of the rot comes from the top.
The problem with "far more likely to be critical" is that they seem to never find one godforsaken occasion to be positive... It became too declassee to think that one's country and culture is something to be loved instead of apologized for.
This is another failure to model liberals' beliefs/preferences, or why they have an issue with vulgar tribalism. It is not that there is nothing to be proud of - libs are happy to celebrate* the space program, WW2, the abolition of slavery, rock and roll, the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US Olympic team etc... The disconnect is that they feel conservatives want to be proud of things that are shameful or whitewash sordid elements of the past.
*this list is not meant to be exhaustive; it's just stuff that popped into my head
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
12hr ago
American regional accents in general aren't that strong and have gotten substantially weaker.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
17hr ago
Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture".
Define "cosmopolitan liberals", because I have also heard this over the years. Based on that experience, I think you are probably overreacting to a couple of oikophobes* (or, if you're on the internet, Europeans), who are themselves overreacting to some chest-thumping chauvinists with a highly exclusionary conception of American culture. In that sense, this is a perfect microcosm of the modern culture war in general: people getting worked up over minor or even imagined issues, often involving a fantasy strawmen (or, at the very least, cherry-picked weakmen) of their opponents.
The major difference between liberals and conservatives with respect to America is their willingness to adopt critical attitudes. Liberals are, in general, far more likely to become disappointed/critical if they perceive the US to be failing to live up to its ideals and are far less interested in performative patriotism. The latter in particular I think right-wingers tend to mistake for antipathy. Conservatives, by contrast, are much more adaptive in their principles while demanding uncritical loyalty ("love it or leave it") and deeply love patriotic pageantry.
he gives off this vibe of being quintessentially capital-A AMERICAN in a way that I don't think any US President really has since the Cold War.
"Our enemies hate us because we're too cool."
People hate Trump largely for the reasons they say they hate him: they see him as distinctively - almost uniquely - loathsome and stupid individual. He is distinctively American only insofar as we basically elected Florida Man as president, but that certainly doesn't set him above our other post-CW presidents in being AMERICAN. He is perhaps the most declasse president of the post-Cold War era, but to say that makes him more quintessentially American is an example of the exclusionary conception of American culture I mentioned earlier.
I broadly concur with @LiberalRetvrn here: Trump is a vulgar tribalist (at best) of the kind that can be under any rock in any corner of the Earth. For all the flag-waving and shallow patriotic verbiage exhibited by Trump and his supporters, I find that they are people who have contempt for the history and values of the United States, as well as outright hate for their countrymen.
quoting Teddy Roosevelt (I'm not bothering to quote the full passage)
With all respect to TR, he was just wrong with this one. The persistence of superficial identification and cultural elements was not and is not a problem. German Americans are one of the most prominent examples of this: German American culture endured until it was more or less forcibly suppressed during WWI (Chester Nimitz grew up in a German-speaking household, for example). However the problem there was not German immigrants, who were quite well-behaved, but fearful xenophobes. We can go through a list of immigrant groups and see again and again that the fears of immigrants being disloyal or not assimilating is largely unfounded.
Conversely, the most prominent expressions of disloyalty in US history came from the unhyphenated, and one of the ironies of the "a country is not an economic zone" shibboleth is that the people saying it are by far the worst about treating their country and countrymen as things to be exploited rather than a community of common interest.
As an aside, TR is making a common and understandable but nevertheless important error: divided loyalty is inherent in the human condition. You cannot be American and nothing else. It is not entirely without merit to note that immigrants often have interests other than pure loyalty to their new country, but the singling out of immigrants is a distinct double standard. The same concern could equally apply to, e.g. religious affiliation or personal loyalty (a very real risk, as we saw in 2021).
--
*as an illustrative anecdote, when an acquaintance raised the idea in very progressive company, basically everyone scoffed and told him he was being an idiot. I think you are more likely to find liberally-minded people who don't like American culture than think it doesn't exist, though IME they are making a shared mistake with Southerners in conflating American culture with the culture of the South.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2d ago
For some of the people confused about why Minneapolis is such a big deal still, it's not a scissor event, it's a mask off moment
TBF it's been mask-off for a while, most people just don't pay attention. DHS comms is openly fash-posting, Trump openly rejects any limit on his powers and tries to rule by decree, political opposition is labeled domestic terrorism, etc...
The only group that hasn't been mask off is CBP/ICE, but they have double down on thuggery
To be fair, most people are pretty myopic everywhere, and it's easy to focus on domestic conflict when it's low-key existential.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
Only one of those is even pretending to be an example
You asked for a single example. I gave you a single example.
Seriously, if this is the best you have to offer then ICE is doing a spectacular job.
This is the product of about nine seconds of research to recall the details of a half-remembered case. I see no reason to put more effort into it when past experience has shown that there is no amount of unambiguous evidence that you would accept at face value, let alone as demonstrative of a pattern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavanaugh_stop
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/ice-apprehension-of-us-citizens-derided-as-kavanaugh-stops
https://ij.org/client/leonardo-garcia-venegas/
You're welcome. (I'm sure you'll have some explanation for how explicit racial profiling isn't racial profiling)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
It does feel a little weird to me that this case is getting so much attention.
Because the case isn't about the case. It's about the limits of law enforcement in the US and what measures are justifiable in the name of immigration enforcement.
I feel like there's been a lot of big news this week
These are all largely tractionless issues. What is there to discuss about foreign policy? Nobody has any real expectation that Congress has the will to hold Trump accountable for overreaching his authority, and in the meantime it's just arguing about which of the Mad King's rantings are babble and which are dire warnings.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
They could train their agents better, conduct themselves in a less escalatory fashion, stop attacking protestors, stop trying to intimidate people for mouthing off to them, not wear masks, prioritize targeted operations over open-ended sweeps, not racially profile people or violate the civil rights of citizens by detaining them on no grounds beyond their skin color...
Like, the conceit of Millerites is that illegal immigration constitutes this overwhelming problem that justifies extreme, unconstitutional measures and massive expense, but it just... doesn't. These sweeps are not preventing some dire outcome. They're satisfying the anxieties and appetites of thuggish nativists.
escalations by ICE officers are predictable, if unfortunate.
It's predictable in the sense that they're bottom of the barrel recruits with limited training working for an administration that tacitly endorses police brutality.
Minnesota has always been at the forefront of fighting reactionary forces in the US
To elaborate a little more, this strikes me as a problem with your perspective. Minnesota - and the Twin Cities in particular - have long been quite liberal for a midwestern state. The Twin Cities have a high rate of educational attainment, so while it's not distinctively woke, it's distinctively unfriendly to the thuggish conservatism of the Trump movement. Add in the Trump administration's desire to hurt perceived enemies, and it's not so unlikely that Minnesota pops up again and again.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
A lot of Trumpists, heavily practiced in sanewashing Trump and accustomed to the institutional restraints on his behavior from his first term, have basically become incapable of processing negative attitudes towards Trump as anything other than TDS. It's all a joke/big talk/hardball. Until he actually does it, at which point of course he did it. He said he was going to. The fact that Trump says twenty insane things a week and only follows through on two gives enough cover to act like taking him seriously is ridiculous.
In particular, I suspect the Venezuela operation rattled observers far more than Trump supporters grasp. You don't have to like Maduro to feel anxious about Trump suddenly deciding that rapid, unilateral operations are cool at the same time that he revives talk of taking Greenland.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3d ago
This leaves us with the question of what the point of the entire drama is if the goal is simply to establish more US bases in Greenland, since the US can already do that under existing agreements with Denmark. Is Trump so thug-brained that he needs to see such actions as taking something rather than exercising a pre-existing option?
No, Trump wants to be able to say the US owns Greenland, and his reasons for wanting that are almost certainly incredibly stupid and thug-brained.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
How does that not boil down to simply "the mob is right when it agrees with me over what laws are illegitimate"?
It can amount to that under sufficient dire circumstances. It doesn't have to boil down to that because no every instance of disobedience will take the form of mob violence.
I think the mistake you're making is thinking of support for "rule of law" as absolutist adherence to the letter of the law. This is a position that virtually no one holds and which is not practical in any event because laws are not code and require interpretation. When people say they support rule of law, it means they support an approach to governing that operates according to rules/procedures rather than the arbitrary judgment of individual leaders. It does not mean that they think any output of such a system is inherently legitimate.
I think people generally feel like they're obligated to follow laws even if they disagree with them
Disagreeing with a law is not the same thing as believing it is illegitimate. I disagree with my local zoning laws, but I accept that they're a legitimate extension the county government's authority (which in turn is legitimate because blah blah blah...). On the other hand, if the county government passed a law making it legal to sell your children's organs, I'd consider that illegitimate. Which is to say, I don't just disagree with it, I don't consider it morally valid or valid manifestation of governmental authority. That in turn justifies more extreme measures to oppose it than zoning laws.
Settling disagreements via voting is preferred, but for sufficiently high salience disagreements it's not going to be enough (especially if - as is the case in the US - the electoral system has contested legitimacy). Also, as I alluded up above and in the edit I made after you commented, this is often resolve in a different way: simply ignoring laws you don't like and trusting they won't be enforced or loudly complaining when they are.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4d ago
Whining about it strikes me as pathetic LARPing to some extent
The whole point is to whine about it. The purpose of civil disobedience is to shout "come and see the violence inherent in the system" to anyone who can hear. It is to wave the implications of the status quo in the faces of people who would rather not see it - to force authorities to make good on their threats of violence and ask fence-sitters whether keeping segregated lunch counters justified such actions.
What would the purpose of suffering in silence be?
Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped.
Identifying arguments as structurally similar is useful if you're studying how people argue, but it's not an especially insightful regarding object level disagreement. Certain patterns of argument frequently recur, but you can't substitute that observation for actually resolving the disagreement, because the substance of the disagreement is in the object level. The question of whether or not Ashli Babbitt was a traitor or a martyr depends almost entirely on whether or not you think the 2020 election was stolen*, not on whether or not you think it is legitimate to resist the government under at least some circumstances.
To put it another way: liberals and conservatives both generally agree that you are obligated to obey legitimate laws and you are not obligated to obey illegitimate laws** (and, indeed, may be obligated not to obey - 'orders are orders' not being considered a good excuse for bad behavior). Observing this doesn't help you adjudicate the differences between cases, because you still need to make judgments about the specific details of the case.
In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se
I don't think you can infer that from their actions. If you ask them, they will generally argue that their actions are upholding rule of law and democracy, and for the most part they mean it.
*one could conceivably argue that the shooting was unjustified and the insurrection was unjustified, but that seems to be a marginal position
**In reality, people ignore all sorts of laws all the time, including laws they don't really question the validity of (e.g. traffic laws), which also raises the secondary question of which laws are important enough to care about violations. One could think a law is legitimate, but the measures taken to enforce it are not
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
5d ago
I get the impression that a lot of Iran's badness is exaggerated by Western media. Is the current government of Iran illegitimate? If so, why?
If your country has colossal protests every few years that have to be repressed with significant bloodshed, you probably have an internal legitimacy problem.
It would be good for US geopolitical intrests for the current regime to fall. Does this somehow make angry mobs torching government buildings okay
No. The legitimacy of rebellion in Iran is not based on US interests.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
I'm still hoping someone will put out a longer video that shows the lead up. All the footage I've seen so far is the same couple of videos that all begin seconds before the shooting (granted, it's entirely possible that's just when people started recording).
People here seem to be taking it as a given that she was trying to block ICE vehicles, but the footage we have doesn't actually support that. There are ICE vehicles on either side of her, and we see another vehicle pull past her before the confrontation. It is inference, but it looks more to me like ICE boxed her in rather than vice versa.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
It seems to be that a large percentage (30%, 60%, 90%?) of gay men truly enjoy being deviant.
I'm sure there are some, but celebration of deviancy is often a reaction to being stigmatized. If you're an American homosexual older than ~30, you grew up in an environment where casual homophobia was virtually guaranteed even in fairly liberal environments. Much of the point of Pride was(/is) to be in-your-face in reaction to people telling you to stay in the closet (or die) because you were a moral abomination.
Many seem to lament the mainstreaming of gayness having taken a lot of the fun out of it.
See also: Taliban fighters complain about having to work in an office instead of waging jihad. There's always going to be some people for whom the struggle was a source of meaning and excitement. The normalization of homosexuality means less interest in flamboyantly transgressive behavior as a show of defiance and more PTA meetings.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
Short of physically apprehending them, what would you suggest doing to remove said illegal aliens?
"Physically apprehending them" covers a range of possibilities, and prominent does not include arresting, intimidating, or murdering US citizens. There's also pursuing legal changes that would make it vastly harder to employ illegal immigrants.
The first video has the car physically in their way
The first video has the car bracketed by ICE vehicles and has another vehicle passing in front of it. Strongly suggests ICE boxed her in, rather than vice versa (something they have done in the past as well, though last time the woman they shot survived).
As an aside: Noem labeling the victim a domestic terrorist is absolutely farcical and yet another example of the Trump administration's fundamentally authoritarian inclination.
edit:
"Yep, that sure is the language of the innocent." Comparisons to the Chicago shooting leap to mind, including the likelihood of DHS sabotaging evidence after lying about events.
Local police manage to do it just fine. You do investigation/surveillance and perform targeted arrests rather than grandiose sweeps with masked agents cosplaying as soldiers. (Of course, ICE does that in the most psychotic and inept way possible as well - see the Ozturk case)
Or, since we're talking about immigration enforcement specifically, you change the laws to make employing illegal immigrants virtually impossible. That will, of course, never happen, because it would mean holding the business gentry that run the GOP liable for something.
I go back to: the ostentatious thuggery is the point. ICE doesn't have to be filled with the semi-trained dregs of the Red Tribe, but it is. If you're anti-Trump, ICE is supposed to scare you. If you're pro-Trump, ICE is a steady source of cruelty porn.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
6d ago
Yes, I spent a fair amount of time yesterday evening looking for longer, unedited footage that might clarify the origin of the confrontation.
So far I have hearsay or inference, frequently from people who openly endorse violence against protesters.
I've never seen the Newsroom, so I'm going to need you to clarify what you're trying to get across here.
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